Chapter 1: The Last Walk
January in Sierpc was not simply a season. It was a state of matter, one in which the town froze solid, contracting into itself like a beaten animal. The frost that evening didn't nip; it bit, driving itself into exposed skin with a thousand invisible needles, penetrating layers of wool and polyester, hunting for warmth it could steal. The sky above the municipal park was the color of a bruise — dirty violet bleeding into black, smothered by low clouds that strangled the streetlights, smearing them into sick, yellow stains on the snow.
Weronika adjusted the strap of her bag, which was cutting into her shoulder despite her thick jacket. Her breath steamed, forming clouds in front of her face that vanished before she had time to think about them. The snow beneath her boots squeaked. It was the only sound within a kilometer. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Rhythmic, loud, accusatory. In that silence it sounded like the snapping of bones. She wished she had brought her headphones, but her phone battery had died back at the café. Now she was alone with that sound and with a city that seemed to be holding its breath.
She was twenty years old and held a conviction that the world was logical. That if you walked along a lamp-lit pavement in the town where you had grown up, nothing bad could happen to you. It was a lie she fed to her reptilian brain, trying to silence the alarm that had begun howling in her head a minute ago. She felt a gaze on her back. No — not a gaze. A weight. The physical pressure of someone's attention, sticky and dense.
She slowed her pace. The sound of squeaking snow stopped. Behind her — silence. Absolute, dead silence.
She spun around sharply, the way the self-defense courses she'd watched on YouTube had taught her — with confidence, to show any potential attacker that she was not a victim. But there was no one behind her. Only an avenue lined with old horse chestnuts, their bare branches scratching at the sky like the bony fingers of the drowned. Shadows lay across the snow in long, contorted strips. Emptiness.
"You're an idiot," she whispered to herself. Her voice was hoarse, unfamiliar.
Her heart, however, paid no attention to logic. It hammered against her ribs with a force that hurt, pumping adrenaline into muscles that had tensed themselves, ready for flight. Weronika pushed back a strand of hair that had plastered itself to her sweaty forehead. She was sweating in the frost. A bad sign. The body always knew first.
She moved on, faster. Every step was now a battle against a gravity that seemed to drag her downward, toward the frozen earth. The municipal park, by day a place for mothers with strollers, transformed at night into a labyrinth. The trees seemed to shift, tightening their circle, while the shadows between them thickened and took on shapes that human eyes had no business recognizing.
Then she felt it. A smell. Not exhaust fumes, not chimney smoke — the kind that choked Sierpc every winter. This was the smell of raw meat, old blood, and wet fur. A smell that had no place in the civilized world. It struck her nostrils and triggered a sudden wave of nausea.
She stopped at a bench, gulping greedily at the air, trying to force that stench from her lungs. Her gaze drifted right, toward the dense thicket of shrubs that separated the park from the old cemetery. Something was there. A shadow that was blacker than the night. A shadow that had eyes.
Two points reflecting the light of a distant streetlamp. Low to the ground, and yet too high for a dog. Yellow. Unmoving.
Weronika felt an icy knot form in her stomach. Her legs refused to obey, grew heavy, as if they had taken root in the pavement. Paralysis. This was the reaction no action film ever mentioned. Fear does not give you wings. Fear is concrete poured over your feet.
"Hello?" she threw into the darkness. The word hung in the frozen air, pitiful and fragile.
The shadow moved. No — it didn't retreat. It grew. It peeled away from the trunk of a tree with a fluidity that defied the laws of physics. The figure was massive, unnaturally broad across the shoulders, hunched as though bearing the weight of this entire godforsaken town. And it had a head — the head of a wolf.
Weronika's brain tried to rationalize it. A costume. Someone dressed up. One of Kamil's stupid jokes. But no costume could produce a stench like that. No person in fancy dress stood with such utter stillness, radiating a dread that made the hairs on her arms stand on end beneath her thick sweater.
Marek Sokołowski looked at her through the holes cut into the dried hide. He felt against his face the roughness of tanned leather, the smell of old tallow and the preservatives his father had rubbed into this artifact a decade ago. But beneath all of that he felt something more important. The smell of the girl's fear. It was sharp, sour, almost metallic. She smelled like quarry driven into a dead end. Like a victim who had just understood her fate.
He felt no hatred toward her. No anger. What he felt was closer to exhaustion and a sense of duty. Like a butcher who walks into the slaughterhouse at four in the morning. This is not murder. This is work. This is necessity. The forest was hungry. The earth beneath Sierpc trembled with thirst, and he was merely the instrument — a scalpel in the hands of Veles.
"Time," Marek whispered. His voice was muffled by the mask, low and rough as the grinding of millstones.
Weronika stepped back. Then stepped back again. Her mind finally broke through the block. Run. Run. Scream.
She opened her mouth to cry out, but from her throat came only a faint whimper, like a wounded bird. Her vocal cords had locked in spasm. She spun on her heel, slipped on ice hidden beneath the snow, windmilled her arms in panic. Her bag struck the ground with a dull thud. Her phone, her wallet, her lip gloss — her entire life scattered across the dirty snow.
She didn't care. She flung herself toward the street, where the lights of a passing car flickered in the distance. Rescue. Civilization. If she could reach the curb, she would be safe. If someone saw her—
She heard heavy, rhythmic footsteps behind her. He wasn't running. He was charging. The sound of boots striking frozen earth was immense, relentless. Marek had no need to hurry. He knew this park. He knew every path, every root. He had hunted here before she was born.
Weronika reached the streetlamp, grabbing its metal pole as though it were an anchor in reality. She looked back. The figure was right behind her. In the lamplight the wolf's head looked even more grotesque — hollow eye sockets, bared and yellowed fangs, dead fur matted with something dark.
"Please—" she sobbed. It was not a plea. It was a surrender.
Marek did not answer. You do not speak to food. You do not negotiate with prey. He reached out his hand. The palm in its leather, butcher's glove was enormous. He seized her by the scruff of the neck, at the point where her jacket ended and her hair began. His fingers closed with the force of a vice.
The pain was blinding. Weronika felt her feet leave the ground. The world spun. Snow, streetlamp, sky, wolf's snout — everything merged into a single, whirling smear. She tried to claw at him, to kick, but her limbs were like cotton wool. She felt small. She felt like nothing.
Marek dragged her toward the shadow, to where the park paths ended in a blind alley beside the old wall. There a van was waiting. A white Volkswagen T4, dirty with slushy mud, engine running at idle. The diesel ticked softly, steadily, like the heart of a sick animal.
He pulled the side door open with a single wrench. From inside came a rush of warm, stifling air. It smelled of chlorine and something sweet, something rotting. Weronika braced her feet against the sill. The survival instinct flared inside her with renewed force.
"No! I won't get in! Help! Help!" she screamed at last, and the scream tore through the night silence, echoing off the empty apartment blocks on the far side of the street.
Someone must have heard that. Lights must have come on in windows. Someone must have looked out.
Marek sighed beneath the mask. He did not like noise. Noise was a lack of respect for the silence of the forest. He struck her across the face with an open palm. Briefly, technically, without emotion. Weronika's head snapped back and cracked against the doorframe. Darkness exploded before her eyes.
Dazed, she tasted blood in her mouth. It was salty and warm. Strength left her in a fraction of a second. Marek shoved her inside like a sack of flour. She dropped onto the metal floor lined with thick painter's plastic. The sheeting rustled under her weight, slick and cold.
The sliding door slammed shut with a bang that sounded like a verdict. The darkness inside was absolute, broken only by faint light from the cab, separated from her by a metal grille.
Weronika lay curled into a ball, shaking not from cold but from shock. She heard Marek climb into the driver's seat. A door slammed. The seat groaned under his weight. The engine revved, climbing to higher rpm.
Through the grille she could make out the silhouette of his head. He had taken the wolf mask off. Tossed it onto the passenger seat. Weronika saw in the rearview mirror a fragment of his face. It was terrifyingly ordinary. The tired face of a middle-aged man, with bags under his eyes and several days' stubble. A face she might have passed in the shop, in church, at the post office. That was the worst of it.
"Why?" she asked quietly, choking on tears.
Marek glanced in the mirror. His eyes were empty, like wells with no bottom.
"Because winter is long," he said calmly, putting the van in gear. "And the roots must drink."
He pulled away. Weronika felt a jolt, and then the monotonous rocking of the vehicle. She tried to get up, but the doors had no handles on the inside. The walls were smooth. She was in a cage.
Through the small, filthy window in the rear doors she watched the lights of Sierpc recede. Streetlamps, lit windows, the pharmacy's neon sign. Everything she had known, everything she had considered her world, was shrinking, growing distant and unreal. No one ran out of the buildings. No one chased the van. The town was asleep. Or pretending to be.
Weronika pressed her forehead against the cold metal of the wheel arch. She felt the engine's vibrations passing through her skull. She knew she was not going home. She knew that this walk had been the last one she would ever take as Weronika — student, Kamil's girlfriend. Now she was something else. She was cargo. She was a victim.
Marek turned on the radio. Soft static, crackling, and then a fragment of some folk melody, which he hummed beneath his breath. His composure was terrifying. He was not the psychopath from a film who takes sadistic pleasure in her fear. He was a bureaucrat carrying out an order. This was the bureaucracy of death.
The van turned, leaving the asphalt for a rutted track. The town's lights disappeared. Through the window Weronika saw nothing but the blackness of forest pressing in on the road from both sides. Trees leaned over the vehicle, forming a tunnel with no exit. She felt the forest watching her. Thousands of eyes in the dark.
She began to cry, quietly, soundlessly. Tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with the blood from her split lip. In the darkness of the van, on the painter's plastic, Weronika understood that the God she had prayed to in the church of St. Wojciech had no power here. Something older held dominion here. Something that had fangs and was hungry.
The car lurched over a pothole. Marek swore softly, but there was no anger in his voice — only concern for the suspension. He took care of the car. He took care of his tools.
"Not much further," he said into the air, without turning around.
Weronika closed her eyes. She tried to summon the face of Kamil, of her mother, of anyone. But all she could see was the wolf's head and the dead, yellow eyes. The darkness around her thickened until it was almost tangible. She felt the cold pass through her completely, freezing out all hope. She knew no one would find her here. That for the world, she had ceased to exist the moment the van door slammed shut.
In Sierpc, on the snow-covered pavement in the park, an abandoned bag lay on the ground. The vibrations of the phone inside it had ceased long ago. Snow fell slowly, covering the leather, erasing the traces of the struggle, blanketing everything in a white, innocent shroud. The town breathed out in relief. The offering had been received. The night could continue.